The Sea in the Middle: Teaching the Medieval as Mediterranean

In the last decades historians have been moving away from the canonical Eurocentric narrative of medieval/ pre-modern history towards more cosmopolitan and diversified perspectives, whether framing the history of the West as Mediterranean or medieval history as global. “The Sea in the Middle: Teaching the Medieval as Mediterranean” presents a framework for a new Mediterranean-centered meta-narrative taking as its departure the notion of a “West” defined by the hegemony of Abrahamic religious culture, which emerged in the seventh-century with the rise of Islam. This included the former Persian and Roman worlds, stretching from the Indus to the Atlantic, and over the course of the succeeding centuries expanded northwards and southwards into Africa and Europe. Until the mid-fourteenth century the dynamic center of this West was the Mediterranean region – a zone of conflict, collaboration and cohabitation of various peoples of African, European and West Asian origin who identified as Christians, Muslims and Jews – bound together in interdependent relationships related in part to Mediterranean geography. By the mid-fourteenth century the Mediterranean was losing its centrality, particularly as sites in northern Europe gained economic advantage and initiative; with the sixteenth-century age of global colonization, the West outgrew the Mediterranean, although the culture and institutions that developed in the pre-Modern Mediterranean would remain fundamental to the Modern globalized West.

The challenge of conveying this new, complex and diverse vision of the history of the West was taken up by Burman, Catlos and Meyerson, with their coursebook The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650–1650 and the accompanying source anthology, Texts from the Middle: Documents from the Mediterranean World, 650–1650 (California, 2023), which weaves together the history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Europe, Africa and West Asia, by balancing thematics and narrative, and incorporating exemplary “artifacts” (objects, texts, buildings, city-plans, art) to convey the complexity and nuance of this world in a vivid, engaging style.

The poster will include an overview with maps and sample “artifacts” corresponding to each of the three chronological periods within this long Middle Ages (The Helleno-Islamic Mediterranean, 650–1050; Conflict and Collaboration, 1050–1350; The Contested Mediterranean, 1350–1650), each of which were marked by environmental as well as political and cultural realignments. It will include sample readings and artifacts that reflect the socio-cultural interpenetration that characterized the era. Finally, it will outline strategies for teaching this new vision of the pre-Modern in both introductory and upper-level undergraduate courses, including sample course outlines, exercises and assignments.

Teaching is a crucial aspect of disseminating new scholarly research and influencing the popular consensus regarding the nature of social, cultural, economic and political relationships. Viewed from the Mediterranean, the history of the West is revealed as a collaborative venture involving people from a range of faith traditions across three continents, engaging with each other in conflict and collaboration. This poster will outline will engage with scholarly research by outling this this novel framework of pre-Modern history and provide strategies for teaching it to the next generation of scholars and citizens.